Wool Speculator

A gang of local toughs sporting a popular look

Investment always presents an excellent opportunity for the sharp-witted among us to spend the hours most other folk are working at the local supper club, avoiding the nighttime rush. I’ve had several wild successes in the investment realm which are likely never to be repeated in this lifetime, and perhaps the 16th most successful of them all was my brief and stratospheric dabbling in the wool trade. In the mid- to late- 1970’s, I found myself on the forefront of the fashion industry, having purchased futures in several industrial sheep operations back in the late 1960’s. I was initially betting on genetic cross-breeding to produce a lamb that would grow to three times normal size, thus infiltrating the fast food market with a delicious product I was developing called “Mutton Chops,” but unfortunately this was not to be. Luckily, I’d taken a gamble and decided to go ahead and purchase not simply the tender flesh of the lambs, but the wool as well. I expected I might use it as stuffing for my popular line of camping equipment (more on this in future posts). Neither was this to be. You may not remember, but in the mid- to late- 1970’s, a revolutionary new fabric hit the market– PLAID— and the youth went wild. It had long been known that “wool of the sheep,” as we called fabrics made from fleece back in the day, was an excellent insulator from the cold, even while sopping. Once the roving street gangs of Britain discovered this fact, however, life as we once knew it changed forever. Soon, wool of the sheep was being woven into the jarring, striped patterns that used to be associated with such hoodlums as the Manchester Munchausen by Proxies and the Bristol 86-ers. Mills sprouted on every corner and the streets ran with the blood of thousands of sheep. Children as young as nine were caught up in “dancing” fits, and were frequently induced to leave home and join the melee. I recall many nights when I was kept awake, trembling fearfully betwixt the sheets to the howls of their rampages, captured here in this terrifying footage:

By 1976, I intuited that nothing would stop these hooligans, and properly predicted the high likelihood of raids on secret Scottish wool warehouses. I cut a deal with some of my comrades less-than gifted with foresight, and dumped my goods for a pretty penny. I then sold the addresses of the secret warehouses to the fearsome gang featured in the above newsreel, and washed my hands of the affair.